Hitler's Extermination Order: Rare Conversations with Senior Nazis Released Online

To mark 80 years since Nazi Germany's surrender in May 1945, the Hoover Institution Library and Archives have released more than 800 digitized audio recordings and transcripts. These recordings, documenting conversations related to 20th-century conflicts, prominently feature covert conversations with high-ranking Nazis who fled to South America.

The recordings, taken from the collection of Gerd Heidemann, a German investigative journalist who gathered extensive documentary material, offer "unprecedented insights into the ideologies, actions, and justifications of war criminals." The collection includes more than 7,300 folders, approximately 800 audio tapes, and over 100,000 photographs, with the currently released recordings representing only a fraction of it.

Among the recordings are conversations from the 1970s with former senior SS officers, including Bruno Streckenbach and Klaus Barbie, known by the nickname "The Butcher of Lyon."

A particularly significant recording is that of SS officer Bruno Streckenbach, who was responsible for many atrocities, including managing SS death squads and deploying the "Einsatzgruppen." Despite evading prosecution after the war, Streckenbach can be heard in one recording admitting that Adolf Hitler indeed gave explicit instructions for implementing the Final Solution and the mass murder of Jews.

He quoted his commander, Reinhard Heydrich, as saying: "This is the order from the Führer... He chose the SS to carry out this order. Neither the Reichsführer [Himmler] nor I can do anything about it." According to him, when he heard about the plan, a longtime friend trembled and said to him: "What are we doing?" and Streckenbach replied: "We can't do anything... There was an order."

The recordings reveal, sometimes in chilling detail, the unrepentant mindset of Nazi crime perpetrators. Klaus Barbie, for example, can be heard boasting about implementing the Holocaust in France:

"And the SS was good... We were really good." He also describes violent raids against Jews in Amsterdam and shares disturbing memories: "It was a house-to-house battle... They even threw chamber pots at us and we threw hand grenades back. Haha... And then the drinking. We had a party. Man, we were wrecked, it was such a good group of guys, a brotherhood I never found again."

Decades later, Barbie even claimed: "For us, Hitler is still the ideal."

The Hoover Institution Library and Archives is considered a world-renowned repository of primary source materials on war, revolution, and peace. The new collection is open for research both in the library's reading room and online. Eric Wakin, director of the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, expressed hope that the collection "will be mined by students and researchers for generations to come," noting that the recordings "clearly document the beliefs and actions of Holocaust perpetrators in their own evil words."